Catafalque

Sometimes you see what comes next,
know the end before it begins.

Beneath, I see blue flashes,
the many lives that go through me like twinkling lights.

Sometimes you go deep into the suffering and sit there
because the suffering is there to sit in
so you go to the quiet place in your mind and sit silently
and wait
and wait
and wait…

I am a nondeterministic machine,
morose,
ravenous equations
spitting out nonsense while
something some living thing buzzes in the kitchen.

Two ships pass in the night, lights off
You and I

Sit silently…

You are beautiful and I often dream of you,
dream of the time you took off your shirt so I could treat your sunburn,
dream of what didn’t happen next.
I see your hands at dinner, so agile, harmless and calm.
You wouldn’t remember my name.

Haunted empress,
haloed ghost,
woman with a thorn in your thigh,
if I could be your rib bone I would be happy,
if I could be one breath of air in your lungs,
one pump of your hot heart,
I would be happy forever.

I am instead a statue of basalt tamed and softened by desert winds,
broken open
though my fear of predation is so strong I never bleed.

I am instead a circuit with many pathways,
infinite gates, faulty logic, through which
qubits pass and are never recovered.

This is what I mean when I sing the bright vocables:

I will rear myself up out of the opaque dust,
monstrous scorpion,
the desert of my own interior!

I once went on a journey—
I was not seeking myself and I did not find myself.
I sought nothing. I found nothing.
Is there meaning to every story?

Sometimes I simply want nothing and nothing is good.
Sometimes I simply want my suffering and my suffering is good.

In the end lay me on the earth for the coyote and the yarrow,
let my discrete parts be scattered repeatedly,
let this grant me protection,
let this give me a part to play in many diverse lives.

I do not crave meaning:
I crave baser things.

I sit with nothing,
the smell of rotting meat,
the smell of sweat,
when I close my eyes I see a woman giving birth to a beetle.
Does this too have meaning?

If I could I would be gentle. I would be kind. I would be
as delicate as a pear blossom,
worthy of you,
O song of everlasting regret…¹

I would be the type of woman who could look you in the eye
and say boldly:
“Can you hear the temple bells?
I dreamed of you. You need not dream of me.
But I hope when you hear the temple bells
ringing on the distant mountain,
you think of me.”

I do not know if this is a love poem
or a siren song of solitude
a spiraling egress from the world into my own self-obsession.

Maybe only a lamentation for the woman I cannot be
when she runs up against the woman I cannot have.

For a moment I am very young:
outside my window, in the moonlight,
I see the dogwood flowers falling.
At this age I am still made of ballet satin,
ice skates,
tinfoil spacesuits,
Cyndi Lauper and
the Martian hop

Hah! How long ago that was!
Yet the dogwood is falling in my mind,
my entropic mind.

Now all I am is my own catafalque:
Here lie all my dreams and ambitions, laid out
among braided willow and hazel branches laden with catkins,
one long tangle of wisteria cut from someone else’s garden.

I dream my strange and unsettling pagan dreams,
I pretend to have depth to my barbaric heart.
I am lost in the preta-realm
where I sow fruits that cannot be consumed.
My igneous teeth have become so strong and sharp I could bite straight through
the hull of a pomegranate.

My selves, flashing in the dark, do not integrate:
sometimes, at best, they interface,
communicating essential nonsense over radio waves.

Per angusta, so it goes.
I shed the years of my life like old skin,
that is,
without even thinking.